We started off with Leviathan. Which we killed in one pull. Snappe, Anep’s dirge and Taylona got the flag for VP. It’ll be good having all SS on the raids again. Sasspanz also got Anep’s SK on a pickup levi raid as Anep was out of town, so even his SK is VP flagged now. It was a good weekend for Anep and he owes Sass :)

Venril was planned for after Levi, and I can tell you I was not looking forward to it. It is not a fun raid, at least in my opinion, but I know that my opinion in this regard is a popular one. We zoned in, pulled VS, and promptly died.

This was repeated about 15? times. Enough that we dropped a mender bot and died a few times after that.

I was frustrated. The guild was frustrated. It is a frustrating fight. I began to ask myself, “Would being an Illusionist really be so bad?” I tried to picture myself living in the lands of Rainbows and Lollipops, enjoying the company of small children, smiling at strangers, or feeling guilty for pushing halflings down. The situation was becoming desperate.

Finally, the dreaded words, last pull of the night. Sinnir shouts into vent, “Guys! Kill Venril this time and Castillion will do TWO shots of Tequila, BACK TO BACK!” Now, I don’t remember agreeing to this, but it was out there.

I guess my guildmates either A.) hate me and want to see me fall face first on my keyboard dying or B.) agree with my wife that I’m just more fun to be around when I’m drunk (we’ll save this discussion for a later date) because we KILLED HIM.

So, after the two shots of tequila, with tears in my eyes I basked in all of the warm congratulations in /raidsay “Congrats Castillion on your update!” and I reveled in all the tells of “Congrats man, don’t ever ask us to fucking do anything like this for you ever again” and “Yay now we never ever ever have to come here again!”

Goodbye, Venril Sathir. You were a worthy foe and a complete prick. I won’t miss you.

That was all the raiding for the weekend and the rest of the weekend was fairly quiet as Anep was out of town and, honestly, our groups without Anep are rough. We lose a chanter as I am the tank, so we lose mana regen and, without trying to toot my own horn, also a good chunk of DPS from losing my chanter. Also, I barely put out 1/4th (or less) of the DPS as Anep does when he is tanking so that’s a good chunk of lost DPS as well. Plus, we had another group with 3 healers and Snappe, so our DPS sucked outside of Snappe.

So, we did a couple of zones Friday and Saturday, but mostly I spent the time powerleveling Graybone/OhOh/Nobbi. He’s an old friend from RL (old as in we went to school together from Kindergarten through our first year of college) and has recently returned to EQ2. He had a 45 druid, but I talked him out of the druid as we have 3 druids in second string and 5 gajillion on our server. He rerolled as a defiler so I am power leveling him back up to his druid’s level.

I actually made 2 AA on Castillion doing this as I skipped all the low level instances when I was leveling Castillion up as I mostly leveled him solo being my third level 80.

Anep got back last night and we tried Palace of Ferzul again. We only killed one named and didn’t make it passed the library, calling it after a dozen attempts.

I think we need Snappe’s AE for it and we should do better next time. I’ll give a better write up on it when we kill more than one named.